raleel

I've been thinking a lot about this as well, and the short of it is that the tvout solution is not outputting touch, which is needed one way or the other... you gotta see what you are touching, and it doesn't do those things together

the vnc solution, however, has potential. a touchscreen can map a mouse pointer to your touch, so it's like you moved to a spot and could click. This would allow you to control it via the touchscreen while looking at the touchscreen and not looking at the iphone... in essence, expanding the display on your phone.

You do, however, need to jailbreak, because all the vnc on the app store are vnc clients... that is, you can connect to another machine running vnc, and really, you need to connect to the iphone from another computer.

This could be done pretty easily with a thin client with wifi that has a very small version of linux, a low end processor, and a CF memory card. I've personally put linux on less than 100 megs, and I'm pretty sure you can get the vnc client on there in less than 256.

At this point, you might use a OBD2 wifi ad hoc network (like you would use with Rev). You start the car and the obd2 starts the network. the thin client boots, likely with a fixed IP. It has a start up script that searches the network for other hosts, excluding the obd2, with vnc running, or you point it at a specific IP and make the vnc connection.

You can find extremely small linux machines that would be appropriate for less than $250. You need almost nothing to run this.

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vinnyrb

Got an email back from mimomonitors. They say the thing can't support the iphone because the drivers would be missing, along with the lack of a power source.

I am thinking of buying a 7 inch lilliput lcd screen and mounting onto my dash. But, i'd want a very low profile mount and i'm wondering what kind of cables i'd need to get from the component RCA outputs of the iphone to the composite rca inputs of the LCD. Anyone have any ideas on this stuff?

Fiberoptic

A device could be made to charge the iphone and power the mimo at the same time. that would leave the only challenge of getting the drivers to work on iphone OS. I think mimo's only product with a touch screen also has a webcam which would be uneeded. I haven't done any reading on the new iphone accessory specs that have been released yet. Would a USB type device be part of the new specs?

I would imagine keeping it digital out to the monitor would be required for low power and signal quality.

Multitouch will be another annimal due to driver and complexity. mimo also doesn't have multitouch compatible displays.

so the thought here is you have one cable that has:

nasty vehicle power in (12v) or wall brick.
cable would go to phone.
Cable would charge phone
video/power/touch conrtol would go to mimo or other type of device.

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raleel

A mimo would work just fine for my thin client idea. In fact, it would reduce the power cost quite a bit since you don't need a video card. You could use one of the gumstix i pointed to with the palo board which includes a touch screen controller and usb. If you were willing to use a 4.3" screen, the samsung they listed would just work, no dickering.

A little playing last night really makes me think that we need a better implementation of VNC to make this go. I was running RevLite to my desktop over 802.11g from the iphone using VNC. The refresh rate was killing the smoothness of it, particularly on the graph displays... the ticks on the side were visibly refreshing.

I've run a number of test and feel that Hextile is the best encoding for the iphone. Performance tends to decrease as you add compression and more complex encoding, and the network we are talking about (WiFi) has enough bandwidth. The iphone's processor is just not as up to snuff as I'd like for this.

A new ipod touch might fair better, as it has a slightly faster processor, but I don't have one of those.

A version of NXserver for the iphone would help a lot as well. They have a version for solaris and linux that you can compile, so it has potential (iphone is largely os x), but I don't ahve a dev kit to work with. Get the nx server + vnc + thin client, it would work quite well.

Then you gotta pick up the signal from the iphone when it turns and figure out how it communicates that to the os (probably a register or something in memory). be able to set that, you could turn your thin client display, triggering the signal to be sent back and get an actual rotating thin client that duplicates the iphone.

Kardain

Belkin has a dual USB 12v cig lighter charger for the iPhone, plus includes a mini-usb cable... might suit the purpose:

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProdu...duct_Id=474680

vinnyrb

am going to try and start simple first. ordered an 8' lilliput screen yesterday an it's on it's way. If i can get the iphone to mirror it display on it using screen splitter, that'll go a long way for me.

I had this weird idea awhile ago. Has anyone really explored voice recognition on the iphone? i mean, is there a program that lets me just start up the dialer or the calendar app by speaking into the bluetooth headset? that would be miles better than a touch screen while i'm driving

vinnyrb

i used the apple iphone cables to output to an 8inch lilliput screen with scrn plitter. Darn things works for about 6 seconds then dies. I don't get it.

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